Writing in tategaki/ from the top to the buttom

Hi, I own pages09. Because of my business I am often in the need of writing in japanese characters. All this is no problem on mac, and in those two applications. The only thing I still can't get to work is the possibility (if it exists at all) to write from the top to the bottom from the right to left. This way of writing is called tategaki .( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontaland_vertical_writing_in_East_Asianscripts)
This is the classic style of writing in japanese, and it would be terrible useful for me to be able to write like this.

A text I write should look like this
H G
o o
w o
d d

y M
o o
u r
n
d i
o n
? g
!

thanks and kind regards

macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Oct 2, 2008 10:49 AM

Reply
8 replies

Oct 2, 2008 12:03 PM in response to k4m1

Not supported. (Neither is furigana.)

Leave feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html (like probably thousands of other users) and use another application until Apple fixes it.

There is one old discussion about it at
http://slashdot.jp/apple/comments.pl?sid=370438&cid=1202709

There is not much activity in the Japanese Pages forum at
http://discussions.info.apple.co.jp/WebX?14@22.M7zRcTPeu1a.0@.f02b4dc , but you may be able to start one.

Oct 2, 2008 12:42 PM in response to k4m1

Sure: MS Office (expensive), NeoOffice (free), OpenOffice (free) are some alternatives. There are some more shareware and freeware alternatives, I do not have the names of for the time being.

If you are talking professional layout, you can use Adobe Illustrator (expensive) and Adobe InDesign (but only the Japanese version - expensive).

(Found one more application: Lightway Text: http://members.aol.com/LightWayText/)

Message was edited by: Magnus Lewan

Oct 2, 2008 12:47 PM in response to k4m1

I only saw now that you live in Germany. Do you have the German version of MS Office? Then I think we are stumped.

I live in France, and the French version of MS Office 2008 does not contain the Japanese features. It is very likely that it does not work in the German version either. It does work in the Japanese version (obviously) and in the US version and probably in the UK version. Microsoft has not released any official information about this, and that is really frustrating.

If you have a US or UK version of MS Office 2008, I suppose it works like MS Office 2004: there is a file in the folder "Additional tools" called "Language Register". Using that one you can switch on the Japanese features.

In NeoOffice/OpenOffice you also have to switch the feature on, but I think it simply is in the preferences somewhere.

Personally I use a US version of MS Office 2004 for the time being.

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Writing in tategaki/ from the top to the buttom

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